by Ryan Dubé and Ingrid Arnesen

Mayor Jean Massillon had been pleading for help for months.

His town, Kenscoff, had long been a rare peaceful oasis in the violent landscape of Haiti, but that began to change this year when ruthless gangs began attacking nearby villages. Last month, the gangs used corpses to barricade the road to Kenscoff, strategically located in the hills above the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

Then, the gangs gunned down farmers working in nearby fields. They killed 11 others who resisted kidnapping, including people on their way to sell crops, according to a United Nations report released this week. On Aug. 12, a top police official told the town the gangs were planning the worst attack yet, said a community leader.

By Sunday night, Kenscoff was overrun.

At 9:30 p.m., gangsters stormed the town, attacking a church where people who fled the violence in nearby communes were living. They savagely beat a six-month-old child. They burned homes and killed residents, including the mayor's cousin.

"We have been begging for reinforcements for months, but haven't gotten any support," Massillon told The Wall Street Journal. He said there was another attack on the city on Tuesday night, but police pushed the gang members back.

On Wednesday, people in Kenscoff were reeling after the powerful Viv Ansanm gang coalition killed 47 people and torched homes and vehicles. The U.S. last year designated Viv Ansanm a foreign terrorist organization.

Videos shared on WhatsApp showed lines of bodies on the ground in Kenscoff, covered by white sheets as survivors lined the dirt streets looking for relatives.

"We have no means to even give them a burial," said Masillon, adding that the community is broke and desperate for government help.

On Wednesday, gangsters began contacting relatives of the estimated 50 people they abducted to demand ransom payments, including $300,000 for the daughter of a city hall worker. In a three-minute video posted online, a gangster known as Izo 2 threatened to kill about 20 men, women and small children seen quietly sitting on a floor if police move against the gang.

The attack on Kenscoff is fueling fears that gangs that rule some 90% of Port-au-Prince are preparing to take the suburb of Pétion-Ville, the last enclave of relative safety that is home to foreign embassies, hotels and the U.N.'s office. The government has recently moved state ministries to Pétion-Ville, located just below Kenscoff, from Port-au-Prince's violent downtown.

"If the gangs are able to control Kenscoff, there is really nothing that stops them from coming down the hill into Pétion-Ville," said William O'Neill, the U.N.'s human-rights expert on Haiti.

O'Neill said gangs in recent weeks have been stepping up killings, kidnappings and other violence.

In June, armed men in Port-au-Prince kidnapped James Boyard, a top defense ministry official and the most senior government authority to be abducted in recent years. A recent video posted on WhatsApp showed the leader of a gang that kidnapped 17 Christian missionaries in 2021, including 16 Americans and one Canadian, emptying out oil drums full of machine guns.

The violence comes as a U.N.-backed body, the Gang Suppression Force, begins arriving in the country in the latest bid to take on gangs that have paralyzed the impoverished country. The U.N. force's full 5,500 troops, from countries like Chad, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, are expected to arrive toward the end of the year, O'Neill said.

He said gangs are ramping up violence in a message to the international community and the Haitian government, which has pledged to hold elections by the end of the year, the first in a decade and since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

"They are trying to strengthen themselves when the day comes that this international Gang Suppression Force actually gets up and starts to run operations," O'Neill said. "They want to test if this new force is going to be serious or like the previous one that was pretty weak and ineffective."

Jean William Pape, a well-known public health expert who runs medical centers in Haiti, said he is more determined to fight for better health and security in Haiti. Gang members burned his house in Kenscoff, killed a security guard, his dogs and horses. He called the attack "premeditated, planned."

"We've known for weeks they were coming, they even said they knew where the police were located," he said in a telephone interview from the airport as he was returning to Haiti from the U.S. "They are killing machines, they see killings everyday, they burn everything on site because they don't want any witnesses."